Empowered Patient Podcast

Micha Breakstone is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraLight and points out the lack of objective and sensitive evaluation measures available to diagnose neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Currently, evaluations using short questionnaires, visual observations, and self-reported behavior are further influenced by biases of the physician. NeuraLight is developing an approach that focuses on using images of the eye to produce objective, repeatable measures of disease progression.

Micha elaborates, "We look at over 100 parameters at once, and we capture these by standard videos or anything from a webcam to a mobile phone. And we've developed a quite unique technology that marries, on the one hand, a kind of standard machine learning. But on the other hand, something that is entirely unique to us which is signal processing. So the ability to basically bring technologies that are available for satellites, in super-resolution, bring them down to earth into mobile phones in order to take these standard videos and extract parameters at a super-resolution or a sub-pixel resolution from standard video."

"There are actually over 700 papers that were published in the last 20 years or so showing that oculometrics, namely, micro measurements of the eyes, are extremely good as a proxy both for currently used endpoints like UPDRS and EDSS that I mentioned earlier. But also in phenotyping patients, looking at the difference between secondary progressive MS and repeating, remitting MS or the subtypes, four or five subtypes of Alzheimer's, just being able to look at those oculometrics or ocular measures, being able to identify the subtype of the disease is a great proxy for the standard scale."

@NeuraLight #NeuraLight #AI #Oculometric #OcularMeasures #NeurologicalDiseases #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Parkinsons #MS #MultipleSclerosis #Alzheimers #Dementia #ClinicalTrials #NeurologicalEvaluation

NeuraLight.ai

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Micha Breakstone is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraLight and points out the lack of objective and sensitive evaluation measures available to diagnose neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Currently, evaluations using short questionnaires, visual observations, and self-reported behavior are further influenced by biases of the physician. NeuraLight is developing an approach that focuses on using images of the eye to produce objective, repeatable measures of disease progression.

Micha elaborates, "We look at over 100 parameters at once, and we capture these by standard videos or anything from a webcam to a mobile phone. And we've developed a quite unique technology that marries, on the one hand, a kind of standard machine learning. But on the other hand, something that is entirely unique to us which is signal processing. So the ability to basically bring technologies that are available for satellites, in super-resolution, bring them down to earth into mobile phones in order to take these standard videos and extract parameters at a super-resolution or a sub-pixel resolution from standard video."

"There are actually over 700 papers that were published in the last 20 years or so showing that oculometrics, namely, micro measurements of the eyes, are extremely good as a proxy both for currently used endpoints like UPDRS and EDSS that I mentioned earlier. But also in phenotyping patients, looking at the difference between secondary progressive MS and repeating, remitting MS or the subtypes, four or five subtypes of Alzheimer's, just being able to look at those oculometrics or ocular measures, being able to identify the subtype of the disease is a great proxy for the standard scale."

@NeuraLight #NeuraLight #AI #Oculometric #OcularMeasures #NeurologicalDiseases #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Parkinsons #MS #MultipleSclerosis #Alzheimers #Dementia #ClinicalTrials #NeurologicalEvaluation

NeuraLight.ai

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Jesús Martin-Garcia is the CEO of GeNeuro, a Swiss-based clinical stage company focused on novel approaches for treating autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. While previously considered junk DNA, human endogenous retroviruses are now being seen in a new light as they represent 8% of human DNA and play a role in locking viral reproduction.

Jesús explains, "Our mission is really to focus on and to defeat neurodegenerative diseases. We have an original approach, and we believe because we are based on leveraging the biology of human endogenous retroviruses, which are the traces that are left in our DNA by the virus contaminations that affected our ancestors. We believe they play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and now recent data has shown, long-COVID."

"Yes, that was frankly a surprise for us. It was a discovery led by some academic groups in the US and Europe that showed that SARS-CoV-2, remember I told you at the beginning, this interaction between exogenous viruses in our cells, and the fact that some of them were able to de-repress pathogenic proteins. SARS-CoV-2 was shown to be able to de-repress W-ENV, which is basically the same protein that we see in the brain of MS patients. But this time, it was really, I would say a more diverse de-repression - a stronger expression in lymphocytes in the blood, on endothelial cells of the brain, the heart, and the lung, and also all the way up to microglia, the brain, in some patients that had died from COVID."

@GeneuroO #Geneuro #Temelimab #HERVs #LongCOVID #ALS #MS #MultipleSclerosis #NIH #Retroviruses

Geneuro.com

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Jesús Martin-Garcia is the CEO of GeNeuro, a Swiss-based clinical stage company focused on novel approaches for treating autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. While previously considered junk DNA, human endogenous retroviruses are now being seen in a new light as they represent 8% of human DNA and play a role in locking viral reproduction.

Jesús explains, "Our mission is really to focus on and to defeat neurodegenerative diseases. We have an original approach, and we believe because we are based on leveraging the biology of human endogenous retroviruses, which are the traces that are left in our DNA by the virus contaminations that affected our ancestors. We believe they play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and now recent data has shown, long-COVID."

"Yes, that was frankly a surprise for us. It was a discovery led by some academic groups in the US and Europe that showed that SARS-CoV-2, remember I told you at the beginning, this interaction between exogenous viruses in our cells, and the fact that some of them were able to de-repress pathogenic proteins. SARS-CoV-2 was shown to be able to de-repress W-ENV, which is basically the same protein that we see in the brain of MS patients. But this time, it was really, I would say a more diverse de-repression - a stronger expression in lymphocytes in the blood, on endothelial cells of the brain, the heart, and the lung, and also all the way up to microglia, the brain, in some patients that had died from COVID."

@GeneuroO #Geneuro #Temelimab #HERVs #LongCOVID #ALS #MS #MultipleSclerosis #NIH #Retroviruses

Geneuro.com

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Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills.

Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer."

"You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's health plans intentionally underpaying or playing their own types of games."

"I think, over the years, what I've really come to conclude, is that, for the most part, people on the health plans and the providers are trying to do the right thing, from a coding perspective, but it's extremely complicated. So, the complication of the billing, the regulatory environment where payers have to pay those claims very, very quickly and get them out the door, it just causes an error on both sides, frankly."

@Goodroot4 #goodroot #healthcare #healthcarereform #reinventinghealthcare #medicaldebt

GoodrootInc.com

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Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills.

Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer."

"You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's health plans intentionally underpaying or playing their own types of games."

"I think, over the years, what I've really come to conclude, is that, for the most part, people on the health plans and the providers are trying to do the right thing, from a coding perspective, but it's extremely complicated. So, the complication of the billing, the regulatory environment where payers have to pay those claims very, very quickly and get them out the door, it just causes an error on both sides, frankly."

@Goodroot4 #goodroot #healthcare #healthcarereform #reinventinghealthcare #medicaldebt

GoodrootInc.com

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Dr. John Dobak is the President and CEO of DermTech which is leading the genomic revolution in dermatology to more accurately determine the presence of skin cancer. Their noninvasive platform changes the protocol for assessing a suspicious mole from visual review and surgically removing tissue to genomic analysis and using broader objective data before treatment is determined.

John elaborates, "Genomics is fundamentally changing the way medicine is practiced, and it is particularly changing cancer care and how cancer is detected and treated. We're really bringing that revolution to the dermatologist. We do that with our noninvasive genomics platform. We have something called the Smart Sticker, which is a special adhesive patch that can collect the sample of the skin noninvasively. And it feels a lot like scotch tape, you just press it on the skin, and you lift it off. And from that skin sample, the tissue we've collected, we can run a variety of genomic analyses, and that allows us to determine whether or not cancer might be present in a mole, for example."

"Our first product in the market is specifically for melanoma skin cancer. That's the most deadly of skin cancers. It's the most concerning skin cancer. It's a real problem. Doctors don't want to miss melanoma because it can lead to higher mortality in a patient. But melanoma skin cancer can also be cured very effectively if it's found early. So, the 99% of patients that have melanoma detected at the earliest stages have a 5 to 10-year survival."

@DermTech #DermTech #Dermatology #DermTechIt #PrecisionGenomics #SkinExams #Melanoma #SkinCancer #MelanomaDetection #EarlyDetection #SkinHealth #SanDiego

DermTech.com

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Dr. John Dobak is the President and CEO of DermTech which is leading the genomic revolution in dermatology to more accurately determine the presence of skin cancer. Their noninvasive platform changes the protocol for assessing a suspicious mole from visual review and surgically removing tissue to genomic analysis and using broader objective data before treatment is determined.

John elaborates, "Genomics is fundamentally changing the way medicine is practiced, and it is particularly changing cancer care and how cancer is detected and treated. We're really bringing that revolution to the dermatologist. We do that with our noninvasive genomics platform. We have something called the Smart Sticker, which is a special adhesive patch that can collect the sample of the skin noninvasively. And it feels a lot like scotch tape, you just press it on the skin, and you lift it off. And from that skin sample, the tissue we've collected, we can run a variety of genomic analyses, and that allows us to determine whether or not cancer might be present in a mole, for example."

"Our first product in the market is specifically for melanoma skin cancer. That's the most deadly of skin cancers. It's the most concerning skin cancer. It's a real problem. Doctors don't want to miss melanoma because it can lead to higher mortality in a patient. But melanoma skin cancer can also be cured very effectively if it's found early. So, the 99% of patients that have melanoma detected at the earliest stages have a 5 to 10-year survival."

@DermTech #DermTech #Dermatology #DermTechIt #PrecisionGenomics #SkinExams #Melanoma #SkinCancer #MelanomaDetection #EarlyDetection #SkinHealth #SanDiego

DermTech.com

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Tom Isett is the CEO of iBio which is pioneering the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. Their goal is to reduce the cost, time, and risk of failure involved with drug discovery and development by using a plant-based recombinant protein manufacturing platform to create small and large batches of desired proteins. Tom shares his career journey from working with the USDA to iBio where he is back to working with the little leafy green guys again.

Tom explains, "We are a biotech, so we're a developer of biopharmaceuticals, specifically focused in oncology, fibrosis, and infectious diseases, where we're really trying to address some of the bigger unmet medical needs out there. But what I think really makes us unique is how we develop these new medicines, molecules, and candidates. We use plants to produce these new drug candidates."

"And as we move forward, we also use artificial intelligence for the design of the molecules. So the combination of the two winds up putting us in the position where we have this really strong design capability. Given the nature of our plant-based production system and the technologies that we employ, we get a certain speed component, so we can do it more quickly than other manufacturing systems. This is why we call the technology FastPharming."

"This FastPharming system just uses plants. It's actually a relative of tobacco. It was originally from Australia, a little weed, and we like that because it grows quickly and it puts most of its energy into its leaves. So, we skip that whole step of all this time it takes to get it to produce the protein of interest."

#iBio #FastPharming #ProteinDrugs #Biopharmaceuticals #DrugManufacturing #BioProcessing #Pharmatech #AI

ibioinc.com

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Tom Isett is the CEO of iBio which is pioneering the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. Their goal is to reduce the cost, time, and risk of failure involved with drug discovery and development by using a plant-based recombinant protein manufacturing platform to create small and large batches of desired proteins. Tom shares his career journey from working with the USDA to iBio where he is back to working with the little leafy green guys again.

Tom explains, "We are a biotech, so we're a developer of biopharmaceuticals, specifically focused in oncology, fibrosis, and infectious diseases, where we're really trying to address some of the bigger unmet medical needs out there. But what I think really makes us unique is how we develop these new medicines, molecules, and candidates. We use plants to produce these new drug candidates."

"And as we move forward, we also use artificial intelligence for the design of the molecules. So the combination of the two winds up putting us in the position where we have this really strong design capability. Given the nature of our plant-based production system and the technologies that we employ, we get a certain speed component, so we can do it more quickly than other manufacturing systems. This is why we call the technology FastPharming."

"This FastPharming system just uses plants. It's actually a relative of tobacco. It was originally from Australia, a little weed, and we like that because it grows quickly and it puts most of its energy into its leaves. So, we skip that whole step of all this time it takes to get it to produce the protein of interest."

#iBio #FastPharming #ProteinDrugs #Biopharmaceuticals #DrugManufacturing #BioProcessing #Pharmatech #AI

ibioinc.com

Download the transcript here